Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive and genial co-architect of a nefarious, surreal, exciting, deeply disquieting future of gleaming, AI-controlled interconnectivity no one quite understands but which we're rushing headlong into anyway because the End is Near and we're all gonna die soon anyway and Trump will destroy the world so who cares might as well get a new $1000 phone, introduces the iPhone X at the new Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, Calif., Sept. 12, 2017. less

Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive and genial co-architect of a nefarious, surreal, exciting, deeply disquieting future of gleaming, AI-controlled interconnectivity no one quite understands but which we're ... more

We are, it is surreal to be reminded, a mere 10 years into the smartphone era, and already the thing can identify your face and memorize your fingerprints and evaluate your heartbeats and track your sleep patterns and measure your sweat output and control your housewares and tell your kids to quiet the hell down.

It can unlock your every bank account, live-stream the weather, track your flight, connect you in a live F2F video chat with loved ones a thousand miles away on a cruise ship in the Bahamas, even as it maps the night sky and pre-orders your dinner and tells you who thinks you’re hot and how much someone just paid for your old leather jacket and why your ex never texts you anymore.

Your phone? It barely makes calls. Phone calls are for chumps. It’s a lifestyle prerequisite, a marker of social status and cultural relevance, a tool and a weapon and a drug and a truly ruthless machine-gun of infuriating information, alerting you to breaking news and bleak Trump-stabbed headlines nonstop every second, until you scream and hurl it into the gutter, only to dash after it in a desperate panic, lest you dissolve into the phone-less Void.

It can, of course, guide you through any city on the planet, turn by turn and step by step, pointing you to the best pizza and the worst gelato and where to find the cheapest plastic surgeon to shore up your sagging ego.

It can, in short, do things pretty much no one ever imagined it would ever be able to do in such a compressed chunk of human space-time, to the degree that, just a decade in, countless millions of humans all over the world now suffer deep psychological stress, a destabilizing combination of fear, FOMO and existential dread when the thing is not right there under their pillow where they left it.

Which leads, of course, to nearly impossible questions about what might happen in the next 10 years.

Do you think you know what’s coming? You do not know what’s coming. Some furious, magical combination of voice-controlled augmented reality, creepy facial recognition, personality enhancement, information distortion, instant wish-fulfillment coupled to always-on biometric analysis tracking your every breath and bite and brainwave? The AI so deeply integrated into your lifeblood you can no longer tell the tech from the truth?

All soon achieving a deeply unnerving, but irresistible version of the Singularity, a point when the tech no longer empowers you to explore and create at will, but rather, binds you to carefully pre-determined ecosystems of goods and services that give the illusion of freedom, but the reality of coerced obedience? You might say?

You might. It’s easy to believe some of the experts who’ve analyzed the tech in Apple’s dazzling iPhone X – a truly glorious, stupefying slab of futuristic kit, by the way, from the world’s most powerful megacorporation now operating out of a massive corporate spaceship, a gleaming behemoth of building more beautiful than a porcelain doll and creepier than the Pentagon.

The features of iPhone X are designed, they say, to eventually make the iPhone itself obsolete. Apple is pushing hard to usher in a sparkling, perfectly terrifying era where phones are irrelevant, where everything the iPhone does now will be scattered across various interconnected “smart” tech around you, attached to you, embedded inside of you and your kids and your house and your food and your dog. To wit:

The “Ambient Paradigm” [UBS analysts] Milunovich and Wilson speak of is a future where computing devices are all around us and they use biometric technologies like [Apple’s] Face ID to identify us. It sounds eerily like 'Minority Report' but the 2002 Tom Cruise film likely wasn’t far off in this regard. We won’t need passwords and we won’t need personal computing gadgets like smartphones. Shared computers will be all around us, they’ll recognize us instantly, and they’ll interact with our headphones and other wearables.

Truly, Philip K. Dick saw some of it coming in his famous short story written more than 60 years ago, and it wasn’t remotely reassuring. But it was thrilling. And also unstoppable. Pre-orders begin October 27.

Mark Morford has been providing hyper-literate, award-winning commentary and cultural criticism to the San Francisco Chronicle and SFGate since 1998, which probably astounds him more than it does you. He’s also one of the Bay Area’s premier yoga instructors, leading classes, workshops and retreats in SF and around the world since 2001. Read his latest stories, follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, or just visit markmorford.com for the whole of it. Email him here.